The course of my life was set in a high school gym that smelled of shoes. Standing at the top of the basketball court in front of an audience that may have just cracked double figures, I nailed my first violin performance.
The gym became a concert hall. The three-point line of the basketball court a real stage. The parents in plastic chairs and Stubbies shorts sophisticated music lovers who had paid to see my performance. I forgot about Tetris records and Shipwreck. I thought of nothing but the hum of my violin as my little sonatina hung in the rubber-scented air.
Those were the days before I learnt to analyse every performance within an inch of its life; picking at every note, tearing the articulation to shreds, and cursing my shaky tone. That night in the gym, I had played the best I knew how. The excitement lit me up inside and I couldn’t keep still. I bounced around the back of the hall while some year eight girls warbled into microphones over the top of a Mariah Carey CD. Made up stupid dance moves until Andrew booted me into the courtyard and told me to have a drink of water.
I met my parents outside. Mum was pacing around the car park while Tim tugged at her sleeve and bleated about how bored he was.
“My little possum,” said Dad. He gave me a bear hug and I could smell his shaving cream. I peered up at Mum. Her cheeks were flushed; her mouth pinched. She was looking at her watch.
“Did you like it?” I asked.
She managed a tiny smile. “It was very nice.” She rummaged through her bag. “Do you have the keys, David?”
I followed my parents back to the car, a huge grin slapped across my face. My heart was still racing. I couldn’t wait to share my excitement with Justin. I wished he had heard me play.
I lay in bed that night mentally replaying every note. I sang the sonatina in my head. Felt my fingers twitch. I climbed out of bed and padded down the hall. The house was silent, except for the humming of the fridge. Outside the window, frogs gurgled like drunken cows. I could hear laughter in the caravan park. Flicking on the lamp, I knelt beside the stereo. Neither of my parents listened to music much, but under the record player there was a box of old cassettes. I rifled through the clutter of black plastic. At the bottom of the box was a recording of Dvorak’s A Minor Violin Concerto. I was surprised to see my mother’s name scribbled inside the front cover. I couldn’t imagine my mother ever sitting through a violin concerto.
I raced back to my room and climbed into bed, sliding the tape into my Walkman. The recording sounded tinny through headphones, but I closed my eyes and imagined the orchestra filling the stage. I let the music wash over me. The violin slid to its top register and I shivered. I tightened my fist around the corner of my pillow. The music surrounded me and I wanted to see it, touch it, feel it. It was an excitement I had never felt before and my mind tangled trying to explain it. I remembered Andrew’s words:
“I don’t know if there is a real reason for music…”
Rolling onto my back and hearing the entry of the orchestra, I couldn’t help wondering if maybe I had found it.
“I’m going to be a concert violinist,” I told Justin the next day. Our legs dangled into the rock pool that was built into a curve of the white beach. The sand was dotted with candy-cane umbrellas. Gulls shrieked in a cloudless sky.
Justin squinted into the sun. “What’s a concert violinist?”
“It’s someone who plays the violin in the concert hall.” I kicked my legs and sent beads of water flying.
“Why do you want to do that?” Justin flicked the strap of my bathers. They snapped noisily against my skin.
“Ouch!” I shoved him into the water. His tanned face lit up.
“Wanna have a wrestle?”
“Okay.” I slipped into the pool and dog-paddled to the middle. “Ready, set-” I spat water out of my mouth. “Go!”
Justin dived under the surface and grabbed my waist. I wriggled around, pretending to protest. I grabbed his shoulders and pushed him backwards until we both flew to the surface, gasping for breath. Underwater wrestles were our secret. I didn’t care how impressed Rachel would be, I vowed never to tell anyone I had let Justin touch my boobs.
“If a boy makes fun of you, does that mean he likes you?”
“Of course it does. Everyone knows that.”
I was sitting at Andrew and Hayley’s kitchen bench, waiting for Dad to pick me up after my lesson. Hayley grinned at me as she washed a strainer of lettuce.
“So who’s making fun of you?”
“No-one,” I said, suddenly embarrassed.
She smiled. “An amant secret, hey?”
“What?”
“It’s French,” she said, emerging from the fridge with a handful of vegetables. “It means, like, secret lover or something.”
Justin was certainly no French lover.
“Geeky girl with her Mozart music.”
“Don’t be such a dickwad.”
“I know you are, but what am I?”
The taunts were endless and, if Hayley was right, it scared me a little. This was Justin, my best friend, my Shipwreck buddy, who I punched and tickled and teased without consequence. Something was changing between us and I wasn’t sure I wanted it to. I felt powerless to stop it like I was caught in a rip I couldn’t swim out of. I tried to push my thoughts of Justin away by focusing on my music.
“I’m going to be a concert violinist,” I announced to everyone I saw, drilling Andrew with endless questions and raiding his CD rack for anything that contained a string section. I rested my chin in my hand and sighed contentedly.
“You are a little love-sick aren’t you,” Hayley giggled as she sliced a carrot. Her red nails flashed like Christmas tree lights.
“What are you making?”
“Just salad. Want some? I have the best dressing.”
“I can’t. Mum will be mad if I eat before dinner.”
"Okay." She held a stick of celery under the tap. Her yellow skirt bounced around her thighs like a cheerleading dress. I pulled a pile of CDs out of my violin case and began to read the back covers.
“What are you looking at?”
“Andrew lent them to me. This is a Ravel violin sonata and this is Tchaikovsky Serenade for Strings and this one’s Bach. Andrew says he’s very happy to have someone in this town to share them with.”
“You know you’re sounding really good on the violin,” said Hayley. “I can hear you in the basement. Sometimes I can’t tell if it’s you or Andrew playing.”
I didn’t believe her. “I don’t know. My double stops are really bad.”
“You musicians are all the same,” she said. “You’re never happy. You always have to be better.”
“Of course. Isn’t a good thing to want to improve?”
She shrugged. “I suppose. I just don’t think you should stress so much about sounding perfect. You have to have a life as well.”
“Music is my life,” I said. “At least, it will be soon when I become a concert violinist.”
“Well,” said Hayley, tossing the vegetables into a bowl. “I’m impressed. When I was your age, the biggest thing in my life was deciding which boy I was going to have lunch with.”
I wasn’t surprised.
On the first weekend of our school holidays, Justin’s parents took us out in their boat. It was a trawler Justin’s dad used mainly for fishing, but he had added a glass bottom to the stern deck so he could take tourists out to the reef. I sat with my legs dangling over the side, green water licking my toes. A thin yellow haze rose from the sea. I inhaled deeply and let the salty air fill my lungs.
Justin climbed onto the railing beside me. “Nice hat,” he teased.
I had found a wide straw sunhat in my mum’s wardrobe and tied it under my chin with a ribbon. I thought I looked like Anne of Green Gables.
“I’m protecting my complexion,” I snapped. “I’m getting freckles.”
Justin jumped off the rail. “You are getting freckles!” He poked a bony finger under my hat. “There’s one, two, three, four-”
I smacked his hand away.
“Stop teasing Abby,” said Justin’s mum, Michelle. She was stretched out behind us on a beach towel, reading a book and drinking some lumpy green health juice that looked like toxic waste. My mother called our neighbours ‘new age’ and ‘burnt out hippies’. Michelle was wearing bathers and a cheesecloth blouse with flowers embroidered on the sleeve. Her hair was tied back with a scarf and she wore big hoop earrings. I didn’t think she looked burnt out at all.
My dad said that if Michelle ever tried to make him drink that wheat-grass malarky he’d chuck a mental. I thought he could be a little more open-minded about the whole thing. When I’d tried to tell him this, Mum had said:
“Don’t talk back to your father, Abigail.”
My mother’s name was Sarah-Marie, which always sounded to me like a good name for a glamorous movie star. Mum wasn’t glamorous though, not by any stretch of the imagination. She always wore shorts and long denim shirts, which were faded under the arms where she had scrubbed out the sweat marks. I wished my mum would try to be a bit more exciting, like Michelle was. Maybe not with the hoop earrings and stuff, but a glass of toxic waste wouldn’t hurt her every now and then. Maybe sometimes Sarah could try to be a little more like her neighbours.
“My dad’s getting a new boat,” said Justin. “It’s, like, twice as big as this one. I’m going to get my boat license as soon as I turn sixteen. Dad already told me what some of the questions on the test are.” His eyes were sparkling. I tried to sound interested.
“Cool.”
I wandered into the cockpit and watched Justin’s dad guide the boat through the shallow water.
“What’s out that way?” I asked, pointing across the hazy ocean.
Justin’s dad chuckled. “More water. Some islands.”
I leapt onto a bench. “Yeah, but if you just kept going, what country would you get to?”
He pushed his lips to one side of his mouth so I could tell he was thinking. “Well eventually you’d get to Vanuatu and places like that,” he said. “The Solomons…”
“Fiji?”
Justin’s dad nodded. “Yeah, Fiji’s out that way.”
“And then?”
He laughed his gravelly laugh. “You thinking about running off with my boat, Ab?”
“I just want to know,” I said edgily. Apart from the Shipwreck extravaganzas, I had never been any further than Townsville, when Dad had driven his Ute down there to buy new sheet metal for the caravan roofs.
“Why would you ever want to leave this place?” my mum always said. “You’ve got beautiful beaches, and sun and lots of peace and quiet… Why go anywhere else?”
“Can I have a go at steering the boat?” I asked. Justin’s dad wiped his forehead with the back of his wrist.
“Maybe on the way back. Anyway, I’m about to stop. Why don’t you kids go get your snorkelling gear ready?”
For someone who had grown up on the reef, I was total crap at snorkelling. I always breathed through my nose and inhaled the seawater that kept filling up inside my mask. Justin was much better. He could dive under the surface, then blow the water out his snorkel when he got back up. He and his brother Hugh knew the names of all the fish too.
“I saw a red emperor.”
“I saw a parrotfish.”
“Oh yeah, well I saw some copepod plankton.”
Justin swam up behind me. “I saw a shark!” He poked my waist. I emptied the water out of my mask while Rachel shrieked and thrashed her way back to the boat.
“You did not,” I said.
“Yes I did.”
“It was a gummy shark!” cried Hugh, folding his lips over his teeth and paddling towards me with a throaty groan. I splashed him in the face and hoped he’d swallowed a decent amount of copepod plankton.
“Stop scaring the girls,” said Justin’s dad from the deck.
I swam back to the boat, where Rachel was cowering in her Little Miss Naughty towel. I took off the canvas shoes I wore on the coral. They made a squelching sound as I peeled them off my feet.
“Can we go?” I asked. “I have a violin lesson.”
“Soon,” said Justin’s dad. He disappeared into the cockpit. Rachel and I flopped onto the deck and I pushed my hat back over my sticky hair.
“What’s with the weird hat?” asked Rachel.
“I don’t want to get freckles,” I said abruptly. “If that’s okay with you.”
“You’ve got freckles already.”
I huffed.
“I shaved my legs,” Rachel announced, admiring the shiny calves poking out the bottom of her towel. “Don’t they look good?”
I shrugged irritably. They looked like the same round, blotchy legs she had always had.
“What’s wrong?”
I pouted. “I want to go. I have violin.”
“You always have violin.”
I raced into Andrew’s house, my wet ponytail dangling down my neck and my bathers clinging to the back of my shorts.
“Sorry I’m late,” I huffed. “I had to go on this dumb boat trip and they took forever looking at the coral and then we had to go find some stupid island, then they wouldn’t listen when I said I had violin…”
“Nice hat,” said Andrew. I ripped it off my head and threw it on the floor. I clicked open my violin case in silence.
“Guess what?” Andrew was perched on the edge of the piano seat and was tossing his pencil in the air. “Me and Hayley are having a baby.”
“Hey, cool!” I spun around. “When?”
“December.” He pounded a few random chords on the piano.
“Can I baby-sit?” I asked hopefully.
“Um, I guess.”
“I’m very responsible,” I said. “Just ask my dad. I pick up all the pegs off the ground in the caravan park every day for my pocket money. Besides, by December, I’ll be nearly thirteen.”
Andrew raised his eyebrows. “Thirteen? You’re growing up, Abs.”
I grinned. “Yep. So can I baby-sit?”
He leaned back against the piano. “Where are you going to high school?”
“Acacia High,” I told him. “Where else would I go?”
“I don’t know.” He leapt up and tapped his pencil on the edge of my music stand. “Show me some scales.”
“Why did you ask that?” I pushed, as I tucked my violin under my chin.
Andrew shook his head. “It’s not important. Let’s hear B flat major.”